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Conservation

Evaluating Conservation

Conservation programs, though not adequate in and of themselves to protect biodiversity, have clearly done good.

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The "extinct in the wild" metric refers to the number of species since 1993 that either have gone extinct or face(d) a serious threat of going extinct. The "conserved" metric is how many species have had conservation programs, and the "species saved" metric is how many species the authors estimate were actually saved by conservation programs. Source: 1.

Fully funding conservation programs to protect habitat is likely to be an order of magnitude more expensive than simply conserving species, but should still be well worth the investment in terms of ecoysystem services.

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Annual cost of conserving all species, saving habitat for all endangered species, and yielded ecosystem services. Sources: actual spending from Barbosa and Tella 2 and other figures from McCarthy et al. 3.

Aside from the amount of spending, one can ask the effectiveness of spending in conservation. A disproportionate amount of attention may be paid to "charismatic megafauna", or large species that capture the public's imagination but are not particularly important to the ecosystem 4.

Willingness-to-pay is one way to ascertain the value the public places on a particular good, though WTP studies have been criticized for being inaccurate and the divergence between stated and actual willingness to pay. The following WTP values have been found in the United States for conservation.

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These figures are for illustrative purposes; not all species are actually threatened. Source: 5.

Willingness-to-pay analysis has also found a public willingness to spend an extra $5-15 for admission to a nature preserve for the purpose of better conservation 6, 7, 8, 9.

Problem:
Extinction
Solution:
Increase Conservation Spending

De-Extinction

De-extinction is the process of reviving a species that has gone extinct, which may be accomplished through cloning, genome editing, or breeding extant species. The revived species is typically similar to, but genetically distinct, from the past extinct species. Perhaps the best known ongoing de-extinction project is Pleistocene Park, an effort in Siberia to bring back large herbivores such as mammoths.

De-extinction is significantly more expensive than traditional conservation measures, and it is feared that it could detract from conservation resources, ultimately increasing the extinction rate 10.

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Source: Bennett et al. 10.

Conversely, de-extinction could advance biological knowledge and increase the total pool of conservation resources 11.

The ability of resurrected creatures to survive, relatively free of suffering, is uncertain, as a species' habitat was likely degraded to cause it to go extinct in the first place 12.

References

  1. Bolam, F. et al. "How many bird and mammal extinctions has recent conservation action prevented?". Society for Conservation Biology, Conservation Letters. September 2020. ↩

  2. Barbosa, A., Tella, J. "How much does it cost to save a species from extinction? Costs and rewards of conserving the Lear's macaw". Royal Society open science 6(7): article 190190. July 2019. ↩

  3. McCarthy, D., Donald, P., Scharlemann, J., Buchanan, G., Balmford, A., Green, J., Bennun, L., Burgess, N., Fishpool, L., Garnett, S., Leonard, D., Maloney, R., Morling, P., Schaefer, H., Symes, A., Wiedenfeld, D., Butchart, S. "Financial Costs of Meeting Global Biodiversity Conservation Targets: Current Spending and Unmet Needs". Science 338(6109), pp. 946-949. November 2012. ↩

  4. Marris, E. "Charismatic mammals can help guide conservation". Nature News. December 2013. ↩

  5. Richardson, L., Loomis, J. "The total economic value of threatened, endangered and rare species: An updated meta-analysis". Ecological Economics 68(5), pp. 1535-1548. March 2009. ↩

  6. Aseres, S., Sira, R. "Estimating visitors' willingness to pay for a conservation fund: sustainable financing approach in protected areas in Ethiopia". Heliyon 6(8), article e04500. August 2020. ↩

  7. Bhandari, A., Heshmati, A. "Willingness to Pay for Biodiversity Conservation". Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing 6, pp. 612-623. September 2010. ↩

  8. Fan, H., Yang, Z., Wang, H., Xu, X. "Estimating willingness to pay for environment conservation: a contingent valuation study of Kanas Nature Reserve, Xinjiang, China". Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 180(1-4), pp. 451-459. September 2011. ↩

  9. Kamri, T. "Willingness to Pay for Conservation of Natural Resources in the Gunung Gading National Park, Sarawak". Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 101, pp. 506-515. November 2013. ↩

  10. Bennett, J., Maloney, R., Steeves, T., Brazill-Boast, J., Possingham, J., Seddon, J. "Spending limited resources on de-extinction could lead to net biodiversity loss". Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, Article Number 0053. March 2017. ↩ ↩2

  11. Donlan, J. "De-extinction in a crisis discipline". Frontiers of Biogeography 6(1). 2014. ↩

  12. Browning, H. "Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Mammoths? De-extinction and Animal Welfare". Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31, pp. 785–803. January 2019. ↩